Users needed or not by ports

[Jason]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 05:56:34PM +0200, David DEMELIER thus spake:
>2010/10/12 Florent Thoumie <flz at xbsd.org>:
>> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 5:01 PM, David DEMELIER
>> <demelier.david at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Before writing a patch for the ports framework, I just want to be sure
>>> that FreeBSD ports shouldn't use a same user added by ports. For
>>> example pulseaudio adds some users to the system (pulse,
>>> pulse-whatever) and should these users be needed from others ports ?
>>>
>>> My plan is :
>>>
>>> 1. Register users added and needed by ports in files like +USERS +GROUPS,
>>> 2. When make deinstall or pkg_delete port_name check if the user is
>>> still needed by other port (if this is possible)
>>> 3. Print a message like "The following users and group are not needed
>>> anymore by the system : xxx yyy"
>>>
>>> pkgsrc already use something like this, so a port should be really
>>> easy to be done.
>>
>> This has already been discussed (including in a thread that you started [1]).
>>
>> This needs support in both ports and pkg_install.
>>
>> [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-ports@freebsd.org/msg27486.html
>>
>> --
>> Florent Thoumie
>> flz at FreeBSD.org
>> FreeBSD Committer
>>
>
>Yes, for pkg_install I think I will talk to bapt because he's working
>on pkgng so maybe he has a great idea and a better knowledge in C, for
>the moment I made some changes in ports/Mk directory but not finished.
>I still need to know if a multiple ports could use a same user that
>has been added by one of them.
>
>I don't find any good example for this issue.
>

I had brought this up on #bsdports, and it was mentioned that this was in
HEAD before, but no longer present is the ability to sign packages. 

I mentioned this because you can change the +CONTENTS file and it will be
represented and read with no issue by subsequent queries of pkg_info. I
would think that if you could edit the +CONTENTS file, or any file for that
manner within pkgdb, this could pose potential security and/or stability
issues.

-jgh